There's a temptation, in writing this kind of reflection, to look back on my MTC experience the way a mountain climber at the summit looks back down the face he just scaled, feeling an immense sense of accomplishment.
Maybe it's my infrequent blogging, but at this point an honest reflection on my journey is far more mystifying, like the climber who sees clouds below and above him and can't tell where he is relative to the summit. Do I feel a sense of accomplishment? Maybe.
I feel a little frustrated that I can't describe the past two years with more pride, but I think a lot of that has to do with my switching schools after the first year. I've had, in effect, two first years, though in drastically different contexts.
In the last week of our first summer's training, I was pulled aside by the MTC'er who had just finished her last year at my school. "It's going to be hell," she warned me. It wasn't quite that, but I quickly learned what she had meant. Between continual administrator and teacher turnover, a typically impoverished Delta population, and a physical environment that made the school feel more like a giant holding pen than anything else, the conditions at my school (like so many others we were sent to) forced me to revise the lofty notions of teaching success I had brought with me. If I could get my classes working and seeing some value in the work they were doing, I'd be doing alright.
Thus, the fall of my first year was, just as we'd been warned, an exercise in trying to stay alive. I spent a lot of that time being shocked at how little respect my students were willing to give me (this wasn't summer school) and how alien my position of authority felt. It took me the bulk of the first semester to even begin taking myself seriously as a teacher.
By second semester, I'd managed to get my students working fairly diligently, and my relationships with many of them began to blossom. With nothing else to do outside of school, even the students that hated my class would drop by before and after hours, for ambiguous reasons. They'd lurk outside the door, make their way into my room and then wander about as I graded, finally getting up the nerve to ask me a question, usually not school-related. Regardless of how they were in my class, outside the antagonism of a classroom setting, they were almost all charmingly immature, sweet kids.
By the time May rolled around, I was sure I would miss the students. My placement, which had seemed just barely bearable for a year, now seemed like an okay place. But a move still felt necessary, if only for a life outside of school. I was living alone in the Delta, with school being the only human contact I had most days.
So I got a job in the Jackson suburbs for my second year. From the very start, the contrast with my first school couldn't have been greater. My school this year is huge, both in numbers and in physical size; we have 1200 students and a new, sprawling building, with a wing for each of the three grades. While my last school was the 99% black school in a de facto segregated district, my school this year is integrated, roughly 60% black, 40% white.
We're also predominantly middle class. When I call home now, instead of trying one home number that's usually disconnected, I have cell phone and work numbers, often for two parents. And when I speak to them, the parents are respectful, eager to work together, and glad that I called them.
I also spent the beginning of this year shocked, but it was at the level of respect that my students did accord me, right from the start. I kept waiting for someone to yell, "Shut up talking to me" or "Get out of my face," but it never happened.
Instead of mere survival, this year's struggle has been in finding the way I want to teach and in getting my students to respect it and learn from it. In many ways, this has been a more frustrating struggle. I've felt as though I'm fighting, even at my resource-rich school, years of teaching that has ingrained in my students the sense that unless they're copying notes off the board and answering worksheets, they're not learning. Or that being asked to explain their answer or to think about why they think something is a waste of their time. The hard thing to realize is that too much resistance to a particular way of teaching makes it an ineffective method, even if I am sure it's the better way, objectively speaking.
In many ways, I imagine that the frustrations of my second year are the same as those of second-years who stayed at the same school. But the one thing I truly regret about switching schools is losing those relationships that I had built over the first year. This year, I strove harder to preserve a professional distance from my students, maybe because they weren't disrespectful from the beginning. It worked, but as a result, I don't feel as close to these students as I did to those from last year.
Still, I'm immensely grateful for the bizarre journey that the last two years have been. I may not know a lot more about how to teach, the plight of Delta youth, or the what's wrong with suburban public education, but the little I have learned has changed me in ways I'm still figuring out.
I get so used to thinking about teaching as the temporary challenge that it is for me that I often forget that people do this for their entire working life. At this point, I know I won’t be teaching next year. I’m comfortable and happy with that decision, but I still wonder what it would be like to stay at my school another year.
Today’s professional development was future-oriented. Our principal told us we’d be getting our letters of intent this week. We talked about the testing schedule and how we were preparing our students for May. Then he described a major scheduling change that the district is considering for next year, something that made me curious enough to want to stick around, if just for a little while. TST (Teacher Support Team, the process for identifying and remediating students in danger of failing) paperwork is a pain for teachers at our school, and we have two employees working full-time on TST. It must be far worse for teachers at other schools, provided they do anything at all for TST (unlike my last school). Our superintendent is thinking of cutting the high school schedule short an hour, dismissing most students at 2:30 rather than 3:30pm, and then holding one hour of remediation and TST work for only those students with at least one failing grade. If the change looks successful at the high school level, the superintendent is open to applying it to the middle school for the second half of next school year, although it’s more likely that he’d wait to start with a new school year.
I actually think this could be a pretty good idea. For a school like ours, running on an alternating block schedule, an earlier regular dismissal would mean reducing blocks to 80 minutes, rather than 92, but I think that change would be negligible for most teachers. The advantages of this program are similar, I think, to those that Mack Currie of Tupelo High School cited for his school’s schedule. The majority of students would qualify for early dismissal, giving a highly visible incentive for doing well academically. It could even foster a kind of positive peer pressure to get out of school early. The one major problem I could foresee with this schedule is that teachers might be encouraged to pass students. There’s already an incentive to pass kids in order to avoid paperwork, but I’m afraid teachers might pass even more undeserving kids if it also meant getting rid of them an hour early. Still, it’s an experiment. If there’s one thing that has persuaded me to try something other than teaching, it’s the feeling that little about the job changes from year to year. This scheduling idea is change, and it’s exciting.
I’ve jumped on the bandwagon and started watching “The Wire,” as every T.V. critic has been exhorting for years now. It really is as good as they say. I’ve made it up to the fourth season in embarrassingly little time. The wonderful thing about the show is that even a T.V.-phobe like myself can feel okay watching it—it’s like reading a novel, I tell myself.
The show portrays the Baltimore drug trade and its intersection with city politics, economics, and—in the fourth season—education. Even though I grew up in Maryland, I know practically nothing about Baltimore, so it hadn’t had much personal resonance for me until I started the fourth season. While I never taught in an inner-city school, I still recognize so much of the educational system that “The Wire” depicts. Before the start of the school year, teachers slump through a professional development session, nearly comatose, as a woman tries in vain to lead them through a chant of some meaningless acronym (“I.A.L.A.C.—I am Loveable and Competent!”). A few teachers finally erupt and ask the speaker how her talk could possibly help them with such-and-such student, who threw textbooks through windows. On the first day of school, trouble with the bells cuts homeroom to one minute, just long enough for students to sit down.
What I’ve found most impressive is how accurately the show depicts the four middle-schoolers it follows. These boys come from backgrounds that are, in a general socioeconomic sense, similar to those of my students from last year. I recognize their tough-guy posturing and their moments of genuine immaturity and maturity.
It’s painful to watch, often, especially those scenes featuring a first-year teacher, a young and earnest white guy. But there’s also something satisfying about seeing such an eloquent, if fictional, expression of the kind of challenges we, our kids, and our schools face.
I realize it's in right now, but my buzzword for this last semester is "sustainability." For the past year and a half, I've struggled to find the appropriate balance in how I prepare for school. Sometimes I'm planning each day as it comes; the lessons I produce are usually dry, heavy on the individual practice and disjointed with respect to each other. This isn't a sustainable pattern, because I'm always frantic the night before and then bored stiff when I have to teach them. More often, at this point, I'm over-planning each day, or spending too much time and energy on high-concept sets and activities that require a lot more of me, both in terms of preparation and presentation in the classroom. I'm rarely bored when I'm teaching one of these lessons, but that's because I'm doing the bulk of the work. I'm not asking much of my students, certainly not as much as when I'm burying them in independent practice, and I worry that they're not learning as much. To be honest, my classroom management still isn't what it should be, and for all that an energizing set can do, it's a detriment if it gets the kids too riled up to focus. So my goal is to maintain a sustainable work ethic with respect to planning, to make sure that I'm neither bored nor exhausted.
What's sustainable for me might also prove more sustainable for my kids
too. Either unsustainable style of planning that I described is less
interesting--both for me and my students--than one that organizes work
around longer-term projects. I'm hoping the projects I plan will be
more memorable as well.
I've been in the South for over a year now, and it still surprises me how extensively religion pervades my co-workers' and students' lives. Sure, my students and co-workers last year in the Delta would talk about church and pray at assemblies. I had a few students who weren't allowed to read Harry Potter because it involved witchcraft. But the people at my new school, while not necessarily any more religious, are far more outspoken about it.
Our town has a reputation for being religious, and I see it crop up everywhere. When I ask my students for favorite memories, "getting saved" is on the tip of most students' tongues, along with winning sports games and the other usual suspects. Somehow a student revealed that he hadn't been saved and half the class exploded in a flurry of disbelieving questions. If I ask students for milestones in their future, dying and "going to be with the Lord" are immediate suggestions. I've had to break up heated arguments about how long a certain Old Testament character lived. On their campaign posters for positions in our junior honors society, several of my students placed quotes from scripture. Another student put "[alpha] give me strength in this test" at the top of her nine weeks exam.
This devoutness extends all the way up to the administration. We were only fifteen minutes into the first day of school-wide in-service, before the year even began, when our principal gave us the unprompted reassurance that "God is throughout this building." I looked up from my cold apple danish and noticed most of the teachers around me nodding in assent. He went on to explain that when they had been constructing our relatively young school building, the administration had prayed together for a way to ensure that God would be watching over the place. They decided that lines of Scripture should be literally built into the walls, ceilings, and floors of every room in the school. Our principal assured us that this had indeed happened. Once again, I saw nearly every head in the room nodding its approval.
That's not the only way authority and religion come together at my school either. On the back of the "In God We Trust" poster that the state requires you hang in every classroom, there's a sticker declaring that the poster was sponsored by a local church. While these examples do ring the separation-of-church-and-state bell in my brain, I'm not immediately filled with secular indignation so much as a personal and academic curiosity. When a student asked me if a personal experience that "changed the way [he] thought about [his] spirituality" would qualify as a rite of passage, I wanted to interview him right then and there. Here was an eighth-grader telling me about a change in the way he related to a powerful idea. Given how devout so many of my students seem, they must have put some serious thought into these matters. I would love to harness that enthusiasm and mental energy, if it's possible.
I've worried about those on the margins of the vocal and apparently overwhelming Christian majority at my school. In at least one of my classes, though, we have a Catholic and a Jew, both of whom are eager to share information about their faith. It was especially great to see the Jewish student share a story about visiting Israel with her family and have the rest of the class listen, rapt, and then demand to know more about what she saw. I don't know that it's always that easy for her, but it felt good to know that that kind of moment could take place in my room.
I didn't leave Cleveland (my original placement) because I was unhappy at my school. True, my school was a hard place to work and it was difficult to imagine going back there, but that wasn't the reason I started looking for a different school. I changed schools because I wanted to live somewhere else, someplace I could have a life outside of school. Living by myself in a small town like Cleveland last year made a difficult experience a truly depressing one.
But while a new school was of secondary importance to a change of scenery, the new work situation has been a great thing. I feel like I'm actually teaching this year, like my students are actually learning. On a more existential level, I come to school happy to see my students, rather than dreading them, and I come home with far more energy than last year. Of course, it's a little hard to distinguish second-year improvements from new-school improvements. No doubt the confidence bred of a year in the trenches has helped me, but I credit a lot of this year's improvements to being in an environment where I feel respected and appreciated. There are perks that I feel guilty even mentioning to other MTC folk, because they illustrate how much wealthier my school is (one complimentary duty-free lunch for a month of perfect attendance by teachers, for example). But that feeling of being respected stems much more from the school climate--my administration puts teachers first and makes decisions with our interests in mind. My last school was chaotic and while we were dealing with a lower-income student population, that lack of structure stemmed from an administration that didn't (or didn't know how to) treat its teachers properly.
There are downsides to having switched schools, of course. I felt horribly guilty last year once I'd made the decision to move, and while the guilt has subsided, it hasn't gone away. I don't feel as though I deprived my students of a great teacher; my hindsight is clear enough to realize that my classes weren't much better--or any better, perhaps--than the status quo. But I did deny my students and myself the chance to see me stick with them and do better on a second try. Missing the chance to return to a school (while we're in the program) is also a drawback. I don't envy my fellow second-years when they describe battling kids who they failed the year before, but I do envy their having a reputation. I'll have to decide whether I want to teach next year (and if so, where) without any knowledge of what it's like to be an accepted, established figure.
Still, I'm unequivocally glad I switched schools. It's made me a happier person and, I suspect, a better teacher.
How was the start of this year different from last year's?
It's hard to know what differences are in me and what are merely in my environment. My new school is so different, so much better that I often can't believe that it is the same kind of institution as my last school, or that it's actually in the same (educationally) benighted state.
Classroom management has been worlds better this year than last, but I don't know where to give credit. It certainly helps that I have complete walls around my classroom, a proactive administration, and students who come from--generally speaking--wealthier and more stable homes. That said, I taught rules and procedures much more determinedly than I did last year, when I was afraid of losing my students' interest. I'm definitely stricter than I was at this point last year. The lid's on tight. But there's also more going on inside. I knew exactly what content I wanted to begin with and I've made sure that my class is one the students want to be in.
Put simply, I have confidence this year where I lacked it last year. It's confidence that could only come from a year of teaching. I know--really know in that sense-memory, empirical way--what kind of a classroom I want to run and why. Too, I'm also more confident letting my personality show in front of a class. Where last year I felt like I had to bend myself to fit the role of a teacher, this year I'm letting my personality augment how I teach.
For example, I never would have tried this last year (my lunch period class had been talking a bit on the way to the cafeteria on previous days):
"So you guys might not realize this, but I drive a really lame car. And I got tired of my friends making fun of me for it, so this weekend I bought a motorcycle."
"No way! Can we see it?"
"Yes--in fact, I brought it to school, and I parked it right out side the classroom!"
(Confused looks)
"Guys, we're going to ride my motorcycle to lunch! But let me tell you a little bit about my bike. It's long, it can seat 23 people, but there's no sidecar, so we'll have to be single-file to all fit on it.
Also, it's invisible.
And we all have to wear our helmets. Luckily our helmets let us communicate with telepathy, so we don't need to talk to anyone else, because they can just read our thoughts. Did I mention these helmets are soundproof? You can't hear other classes."
How has the beginning of this year been different from last?
Last year I wouldn't have been able to get 23 kids to pantomime putting on a helmet (pulling the visor down too--no bugs in the eyes!), turning a key simultaneously, opening up the throttle, and riding an invisible, silent, stretch motorcycle to the cafeteria.
Everything I've heard about the second year of teaching has been borne out, so far. Yes, it's almost incomparably easier, in terms of classroom management, time management, lesson planning and all that. Now that I can actually run a classroom, though, I've got more time and energy to spend fixing the myriad mistakes I made last year. Chief among those is my failure to challenge my students in their writing, especially as it relates to critical thinking. This year I'm determined to get every student writing paragraphs with real, arguable theses and well-chosen supporting details.
My kids have impressed me so far with their critical thinking, especially as compared to my Delta students last year. There's been a glaring exception, though: when we're reading a story, they have a really hard time understanding characters' motives and expressing how they relate to their actions.
We read a short story, "Charles," that deals with a misbehaving kindergartner and I asked my students whether they thought the kid would keep misbehaving after he was punished by his mom. I explained that they would need to consider why he was misbehaving to begin with, since a behavior will continue until the reason for it is addressed. Even with my explanation, most of my students told me that the kid would start acting right "because he got a whupping" or "because he knows he'll get punished if he does it again."
I encountered the same when we read another story, "Thank You, M'am," in which a young purse-snatcher gets smacked around and then fed and cared for by his would-be victim. When I asked my classes to explain the actions of the two characters in the story, they almost always mentioned only extrinsic factors: the purse-snatcher started respecting the woman because she was nice, not because he started to want her trust. The characters' intrinsic motives rarely figured into their consideration.
So what to make of this problem? It strikes me that my kids, 8th-graders struggling to surf the hormonal waves of their adolescence, often don't know the intrinsic reasons for their own behavior. No surprise, then, that they have trouble getting in the head of characters in a story. The difficulty in getting them to take responsibility for their own actions is really in that recognition--"I'm doing/I did (blank) because I wanted (blank)."
It's interesting that my students seemed so confident in the power of a good parental beatdown to quell the misbehavior of that unruly kindergartner. While we were reading "Charles," many students would comment that if they acted like that to their parents, they'd "be through the wall," and I gathered that most of them believed that whupping was the only route to discipline. If they place such faith in the corrective rod, though, that the only explanation for good behavior is something outside themselves, are they giving up some of their autonomy to change themselves?
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